The Saints Row Series Needs to Just Die
A new Saints Row game has been announced for 2020. It's probably time for Deep Silver and Volition to just leave the series alone. | Credit: Saints Row/YouTube
- Deep Silver and Volition have announced a new Saints Row game to be revealed in 2020.
- The series currently has at least five entries and numerous repackages and re-releases.
- Volition and Deep Silver need to take a step back from the Saints Row universe.
Saints Row is a great series loved by many. It started out as a semi-serious gangster sandbox game trying to be Grand Theft Auto. By Saints Row 4, it had turned into a full-on supervillain simulator. Your character could tear up the city streets and run up buildings. Needles to say, it was a fun time.
The thing about a fun time is that it stops being fun if you do it too much. That party you enjoyed the other night would become a massive pain if you had to keep doing it for a whole week. The same is true of Saints Row. You can only beat someone up with a five-foot-long dildo sword so many times before it gets tedious. Not that this has stopped Deep Silver or Volition who just announced a new game for the series coming in 2020.
Saints Row Had a Good Run
Saints Row has had five entries in the series since it started back in 2006. That amount of entries may not look huge, but the concept behind Saints Row is very simple. Tell a wacky story with a bunch of outrageous characters. Each sequel made the stories wackier and the characters more outrageous.
So far the games have been set in huge cities, outer space-hosted simulations and even hell itself. It’s sort of at the point that they’re running out of places to go. Once you’ve had your main character become president of the world and then blown the world up, there’s nowhere more zany left to go.
Volition Should Probably Move On
The big clue that Saints Row had run its course was probably 2017’s Agents of Mayhem. A game set in the same universe as the Saints Row games but with about a tenth of the charm. It started out interestingly enough but ran out of steam pretty damn quickly. It almost seems like trying to make the same sort of game over and over again is leaving Volition with creative stagnation.
There is the chance that Saints Row V will come out and massively revitalize the series by shaking up the formula. The question is if they’re going to radically change it anyway, why not just make it a new IP? If they did that, they wouldn’t have all that free and easy PR and name recognition. At this point, it seems like maybe Deep Silver might be cracking the whip to get this series on the move again. We all know how weird they can be with their hot IPs.
